Which Is BEST For Your Aquarium, Sand Or Aquasoil?

These are the differences between sand substrate and soil substrate so that you know which one that you can add to your next aquarium build. All aquariums have got different purposes, different functions and aesthetics and you need different materials to match the goals you're going for. Sand substrate has got way more variety, way more color, way more surface area for more bacteria to grow so you get a more stable tank and some fish need it. Whereas soil substrate obviously is going to be really good for planted tank enthusiasts, people who want to do things like carpeting plants and people who want to keep shrimp really easy because it slowly leaches those minerals into your water column allowing your shrimp to live healthier and happier lives. So the first substrate that we're going to totally break down today is sand. Now unlike our soil substrates, sands have got all sorts of variety. You've got different size sands, different color sands. You can get oranges and blacks and whites and blues. I personally love sand substrates for the actual aesthetic that you get out of a tank. When you put fresh sand in a tank, the cloudiness goes away and you've got really good lighting like Illymagic Pixels over the tops of those tanks. The reflection, the color contrast looks amazing. Couple that with a really good hardscape or some driftwood and you've got an amazing feature piece tank. So for me, almost any community tank that I'm going to build or heavy breeding tank that I'm going to have is almost exclusively sand substrate. You can still plant in sand substrates, you just need a few additional pieces of equipment like root tabs or you need to be fertilizing your water a little bit more. Generally, your plant selection is slightly minimized. Carpeting plants tend to not do as well. Stemmed plants do okay but you tend to get lots of pressure at the base of each of those plants where it's in the soil. And if you're planting too densely, say five to ten stems in one big clump, you're gonna get rot. So with sand, you need to get smart. The plants that I tend to lean towards in my sand tanks, which are normally community tanks as well, is almost every variety of stemmed plant. I like plants that grow on the hardscape, so Hydrophilia, Java Fern, Anubias, Bolbitis. Plants that don't generally rely on having a healthy root system beneath the surface of your substrate. So I like to rely heavily on fertilizing and root tabs when it comes to my sand tanks. Almost every form of moss is going to do well but you are limited. You're not going to be able to get a Monte Carlo Carpet. Glossostigma, all of these plants that tend to do really well in a soil tank as a carpet don't have that same compactness. So what you end up trading off in aesthetic, you lose in a few of the plant varieties you can choose. With sand substrates, it's also easy to bury things under, like your driftwood tends to sink a lot easier. You can keep larger numbers of fish in sand substrate tanks as well because the sand actually acts as part of a filter. Any water flow over the top of that sand increases the amount of bacteria that's growing all over it and that very bacteria is responsible for breaking down the ammonia and the nitrites, which are two very deadly compounds in your tank that come from fish waste into nitrates. Plus, you have enough plants in that tank, there go your nitrates as well. That's why I tend to lean towards sand substrates for my community tanks because they tend to inherently just be able to handle more bioload. Higher bioload capacity means when you get a big Corridora spawn or you get a bunch of things die off accidentally all at once, your tank holds on for a little bit longer. It's got that buffer room because of the fact you're using sand substrate. Now, moving over to soils. With soil substrate, we're talking about aquasoil mainly. I'm not talking about digging soil out of your garden and putting it into your tank. Though some extreme methods do use actual soil from outside, we're going to talk about aquasoil today. Aquasoil has some serious versatility to it. You've got brands that are quite expensive but have got way better qualities and then you can get brands that are quite cheap that do the same job but just don't have that extra fine tuning to it. Everything I talk about today is going to be all about the mid-range and the average of what you can get from your substrate. Now, soil, it's easier to turn up so you get lots of clouds of dirt. Every time you get a cloud of dirt, that gets sucked up by a filter and then can clog up your filter. There's one of the drawbacks but that can be totally fixed by growing a carpet which is not only an amazing look, it's also an epic filter. You get that thing growing right which sometimes means you may need CO2 injection in your tank and all of a sudden, you've got a way more potent filter than if you were to go with sand. You just needed to do it smart. It totally opens up the variety of plants that you can actually have in your tank. Not only that, it buffers the KH of your tank which means you can keep shrimp like Neocaridina or Caridina shrimp. It also opens up the maximum amount of things in terms of the root systems beneath the surface of your soil. I also notice a difference with my stemmed plants between planting in soil and sand. Whenever I plant in soil, you'll get less root growth from the stem in the water column which means you get more focus on the leaves. Because those roots aren't searching for more nutrients, it's getting plenty of it beneath the surface of your substrate so you don't end up seeing the roots. What happens is above your substrate, you get beautiful lush greenery or if you're using higher tech tanks, red colors and purple colors. Compared to if I was to put that same stemmed plant into a sand substrate, because the roots aren't doing as well in the sand because it's so compacted, your roots will actually try and find their way to more nutrients in the water column because there is nutrients in your water column. So though you may still get amazing greens and colors from your plants, you're also getting little creeping tentacles of roots coming from the stem of the plant in the water column which may not even be that big of a deal to you but to some high-end aquascapers, it's a big deal. Soil compared to sand, much more expensive. I find that soil with really basic aquascapes is unbeatable. That really dark black color ends up giving you an almost an earthy feel and then as the plants grow out of that dark black color, it almost feels like a like a garden like you're literally growing an underwater garden. Couple that with CO2 injection in a planted tank and you've got unlimited possibilities for how you do your garden. That being said, if you don't have a carpet because you don't want one and you keep bottom feeders, you're going to get a lot of stirring up of the surface of your substrate which tends to stir up a lot of dust into the water column. So if you don't want that, it means you are limited to some of the varieties that you can keep. Meaning the fish that you do keep can't be the bottom feeding variety. They have to be either guppies like top feeding or middle dwelling fish as well. If you do want to keep bottom feeders, you have to have something covering that substrate of yours. Otherwise, there'll be problems. And that leads me into the last thing. Though soil substrate is amazing and when you couple it with CO2, it's unbeatable. If you do have constantly stirred up soil substrate, you'll be more susceptible to having bacterial blooms which means you get a certain tinge in your water which is not what most fish keepers want when they start their tank. They don't want it to be cloudy. They want it to be crystal clear to be able to see their fish and to be able to see their plants at all points of time. Now, if you've kept bottom dwellers in a soil substrate and you tend to not get issues and there's some kind of a trick or way to get around it, let me know in the comments below because that'd be so helpful for me in my fish room because I have soil in a lot of my tanks. So hopefully I've laid out a case for sand versus soil here guys so that you guys know exactly what decision you want to go with. Hella into your plants, soil. If you are into aquascaping or community tanks or less manicured tanks that have got a bit more oomph in their filtration, sand. Hope this video helped guys. Hit the subscribe button for more videos just like this one.